Examining the Relationship between Consumer Brand Relationships and Brand Evangelism

Abstract

It is a well-known fact now that consumers falsify profound and meaningful relationships with particular brands and that such consumer brand relationships are expected to impact brand-related behavior of consumers. The study investigates the influence of three consumer-brand relational constructs - brand trust, brand affect and brand identification – and their effects on brand evangelism behavior, which was operationalized in the form of two supportive behaviors namely; purchase intentions and positive referrals. After assessing common method bias as well as reliability and validity estimates, structural equation modelling was employed with 458 sample data to test the study model fit and hypothesized relationships. The findings reveal that the consumer-brand relationship influences brand evangelism. All consumer-brand relational constructs (i.e., brand trust, brand affect and brand identification) influence brand evangelism positively in terms of purchase intention and brand referral. The study highlights the importance of brand evangelism in the marketing literature by establishing its causal relationships with the key brand attributes of brand affect, brand trust and brand evangelism. Implications of the results are deliberated with future scope for research.